Which synths support asymmetric pitchbend?

johnfromberkeley

E.g. Bend up 2 semitones, but bend down an octave?

mschenkel.it

Maybe with some midi utility like midibridge or midiflow or some modular environment I guess.

pedro

That is an interesting question, but I'm afraid I've never heard of a synth that does that out of the box, be it hardware, VST or iOS. I'm sure you could program that in something like reaktor or max/msp but both of those are beasts that have no parallel in iOS. I'm not sure it can be done in audulus, that would be my best guess. Maybe ask on their forum? Otherwise maybe some more experienced users in here can provide a better answer.

u0421793

It can be interpreted two ways (or possibly more depending where in the universe one is observing). A pitch bend is usually associated with a physical actuator (a knob, a lever, a set of ridiculous rubber pads, stretching guitar strings, “tremolo” (misnomer) arm) and the centre of the range of action is usually returned to as home (i.e., a spring return). As much motion is required to go higher in frequency as it is to go lower in frequency. That’s how we think of a pitch bend control as “normal”.

If we were talking about a physical pitch bend, to go higher by two semitones to maximum travel in one direction, but go lower by 16 semitones (or 13 or whatever the octave is) to maximum travel in the other direction can either imply:
*that the sprung centre is shifted away from centre, such that the amount of motion feels the same per semitone
* that the centre is still in the physical centre but the action of shifting semitones feels slower or more precise for higher frequency shifting than it does for lower frequency shifting, which will feel faster or less precise

A hack to achieve the requirement might be to: use an existing pitch bend means, but shift the base frequency of the oscillators downward in frequency away from their expected pitch, and apply an equivalent opposite offset to the pitch bend influence neutral starting point (either physically pushing it up to not quite full travel using a clever arrangement of rubber bands, or electronically biasing its signal higher) such that moving the pitch bend high nudges it up a small bit, but moving the pitch bend low drags it down proportionally quite a lot more.

As for linearity of response, that’s another question altogether.

[Deleted User]

@johnfromberkeley said:
E.g. Bend up 2 semitones, but bend down an octave?

I believe you could do it with SynthQ by setting the key y module and modulation range on a modulation module sourced from key y to Osc Master tuning

Seangarland

For some reason I think I recall being able to do this with TeraSynth?

Ral

Phase84, for sure!

johnfromberkeley

@Ral said:
Phase84, for sure!

Louis himself showed me last night, which is why I asked the question. I never knew you could scroll that menu to 24 semitones.

nick

it's a pity that Phase84's IAA is broken, a really nice synth otherwise

Seangarland

@nick said:
it's a pity that Phase84's IAA is broken, a really nice synth otherwise

I haven't used it lately. What's broken on Phase84?

Will

Definitely a useful performance feature on synths that support it. There was a bunch in the 90s. I wouldn't be surprised if iMIDIPatchbay supported this transformation natively. If not, surely it can be cooked up in MIDI Flow.

nick

@Seangarland said:

@nick said:
it's a pity that Phase84's IAA is broken, a really nice synth otherwise

I haven't used it lately. What's broken on Phase84?

the main bug is that when used as IAA with an IAA effect, you cannot switch back to Phase84, or else you'll lose sound